"Flash Crowd" -- another science fiction word in real-world use

[Dan Goodman]

So why am I a happy camper? We survived an unprecedented triple flash
crowd and logged it all. As it turns out, two of the faculty members in
my Dept., Maarten van Steen and Guillaume Pierre, are doing research on
coping with flash crowds. The research issues include how many replicas
to set up, where to place them, how fast to deploy them, and how to do
it automatically, in real time, and at minimum cost. To simulate
proposed algorithms, you need data about real flash crowds and real
attacks, preferably at the same time.
http://electoral-vote.com

Flash Crowd
 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Flash crowd)

Flash Crowd was the title of a 1973 short story by the science fiction
author Larry Niven, one of a series about the consequences of
instantaneous, practically free teleportation booths that could take one
anywhere on Earth in milliseconds.

One consequence, not predicted by the builders of the system, was that
with the almost instantaneous reporting of newsworthy events, tens of
thousands of people worldwide would flock to the scene of anything
interesting -- along with criminals, hoping to exploit the instant
disorder and confusion so created.

On the World Wide Web, a similar phenomenon can occur, when some web
site catches the attention of a large number of people, and gets an
unexpected and overloading surge of traffic: a notorious example is the
Slashdot effect.

Another similar phenomenon is the Flash mob.

Other reading:

     * "Flash Crowd" is on pages 99-164 of the paperback edition of The
Flight of the Horse, copyright 1973 by Larry Niven. The story (or parts
of it) was originally published as "Flash Crowd" in Three Trips in Time
and Space, copyright 1973 by Robert Silverberg, ed.

     * "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club" is on pages
41-52 of the paperback edition of A Hole in Space, copyright 1974 by
Larry Niven.

     * Other stories in this series are in these two books, and in All
the Myriad Ways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Crowd
* This page was last modified 07:36, 19 Sep 2004.

--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Predictions http://seeingfutures.blogspot.com
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.